Fergie's Tech Blog

Black Hat: Typosquatting the Presidential Election Websites

Dean Takahashi writes on VentureBeat:

Bad hackers haven’t caused much damage this year during the online-heavy presidential campaign. But the potential is there. Consider “typosquatting.”

There are about 160 different ways to type in the wrong web site for www.barackobama.com. Oliver Friedrichs, former director of research at Symantec, knows this because he did a study of the sites that typo squat, or exploit users’ misspellings of web site names to siphon off traffic from the official candidate’s web site for a variety of commercial or corrupt purposes.

At Black Hat today, Friedrichs described the typosquatting study as part of a broader talk offering a warning about how any big election could be threatened by a variety of different cyber attacks.

posted by Fergie @ 8/07/2008 10:38:00 PM